第79回

2011年7月22日(金)

Aid Information Infrastructures and Their Users: Inventive Frontiers in Development Aid

キャスパー・ブルーン・イェンセン （コペンハーゲン情報技術大学）

[ 発表要旨 ] Development aid is continuously changing its policies and concepts. Yet, at the same time it is the feeling of many that aid development continue to fail to meet its goals - to build infrastructures, modernize, alleviate poverty, ensure gender inclusion and equity, and so forth (e.g. Easterly 2006). At present, the fact that development aid continue to fail to live up to its promises and expectations, has itself become a driving force in the ongoing transformation of development practices. For one thing contemporary aid development shows a heightened, indeed quite intense, focus on measuring aid effectiveness. Contemporary development specialists and politicians alike wonder if and how it is indeed possible to measure effective aid. They also discuss what kind of information is needed to build a solid knowledge base on which future aid policy should rely. This presentation explores several current initiatives to make aid information publicly available. It analyzes how specific configurations of organizations, information technological tools and kinds of users emerge through these processes and how these emergent entities create differences and sameness across organizational divides. Beginning with a story about how we became interested in aid information infrastructures during fieldwork among development practitioners in Vietnam, the main empirical focus is on a conference held in Oxford on aid transparency and corruption. When we elaborate on the Oxford conference it is because it functioned as an ‘event’: as a micro-cosmos in which ‘global’ issues and problems relating to emerging aid information infrastructures were synthesized and articulated in condensed form.